Aikiwiki:Stub article
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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Wikipedia:Stub under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Stubs are articles which have not yet received substantial attention from the Aikiwiki editors. They have been created, but don't yet contain enough information to be considered articles. The community believes that stubs are far from worthless. They are, rather, the first step articles take on their course to becoming complete.
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Identifying a stub
A stub is an article which is clearly too short, but not so short as to be useless. In general, it must be long enough to at least define the article's title. This usually means 3 to 10 short sentences. Note that a longer article may be a stub if the topic is complex enough; conversely, a short article on a topic which has a very narrow scope may not be a stub.
If your article is too short to be a stub, consider doing a small amount of research to create a useful stub. Take this into consideration before creating short entries with barely any information. At the current stage of development however it may be more useful to create a short stub and add it to the category Stubs in order to set up placeholders and to encourage future editing of needed topics. This guideline will likely change as the project progresses.
Categorizing stubs
After writing the stub, the editor must insert what is called a stub template so that the article can be flagged as a stub. These stub templates should invariably be placed at the bottom of the article. Stub templates are composed by two distinct parts: a short message stating that said article is a stub of a particular type and encouraging editors to expand it and a category link, which places the article on a stub category.
It is convenient to note that once the stub has been properly expanded and becomes an article, you should remove the stub tag from it.
Stub-related activities are centralized on Aikiwiki:Finding and editing stubs.
Ideal stub article
When you write a stub article, it is important to bear in mind that its main interest is to be expanded, and that thus it ideally contains enough information to give a basis for other editors to expand upon. Your initial research may be done either through books or through a reliable search site such as Yahoo! or Google. You may also contribute with knowledge you have acquired from other sources, but it is interesting to conduct a small research beforehand, in order to make sure that your version of the facts is, from a neutral point of view, correct.
Begin by giving a precise definition or description of the topic in question. Avoid fallacies of definition. Since at times definitions are impossible, you should write a clear and informative description of the subject. State what said person is famous for, where a place is located and what it is known for, the basic details of an event and when it happened; just to give a few examples.
Next, you should try to expand this basic definition. The previously mentioned research methods will often fetch you enough information for you to be able to expose the basic points of the subject. Once you have a couple of well-structured and well-written sentences, you should internally link relevant words, so that users unfamiliar with the specifics of a subject can understand what is written on the article. Avoid linking words needlessly; in case you are in doubt, you should use the preview button and read the article from the point of view of somebody who has had no exposure to information regarding the subject. If no word seems hard to comprehend or relevant enough, simply don't link anything.
Once you have submitted the article, there are a number of courses it may take. An editor might get interested into it and write further, or you could expand it yourself once you have found more information about the subject or once you have more free time on your hands.
Locating stubs
Some good places to hunt for stubs that need killing:
